Hi, so about 3 days ago I submitted a run for the game Equinox. As I had expected the game's sole moderator in lagmastr had not approved the run yet as he's now been inactive on this site for 4 months.
Normally I'm pretty patient about this but as recently as about a day ago, a reddit post was made claiming my run as suspicious and possibly spliced.
https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/5xek48/this_supposed_wr_run_of_equinox_looks_very/
After having looked over the run I didn't notice anything notably strange about it but my words just won't cut it here for obvious reasons. I've already tweeted out to lagmastr about 8 hours ago to at least have a look at it. But he hasn't responded nor has he logged on in response.
https://twitter.com/d4gr0n85/status/838145542353932288
I take being labeled as a cheater quite seriously and all I want is a conclusive decision over this run (be it verification or rejection) so I can do what must to be done to come clean in light of these accusations.
Clearly I need someone to look over this run carefully but with the only mod of this game being inactive (and not responding to tweets), and the situation itself being too controversial to make asking for mod status a possibility here I'm just...kind of at a loss as to what to do at this point and tbh the whole thing has left me mentally exhausted.
Any advice as to what I should do?
Unless multiple people are accusing it of being suspicious, I don't think you should really worry about it, it could be just some random posting about it. You should definitely get on that mod status though regardless, after 4 months it seems improbable that they would come back, especially with 1 run and 0 posts
Ok. As long as I've made clear my feelings on the subject of obtaining mod status in this kind of situation I will take your advice. Thank you for the response.
Those constant changes in Bitrate are freaking suspicious..sorry...even for Youtube.
And one moment you play like a god and chain frame perfect inputs together and then you make really stupid mistakes.
That you suddenly come basically out of nowhere with that game in december and instantly crush the current world record there by multiple minutes and now obliterate the WR by over !7 minutes! while the current WR holder is still running the game constantly and improving...
no..I thats what I call really suspicious...sorry.
It strikes me as a little disingenuous to be so openly campaigning to dislodge and replace the only moderator for a game while simultaneously trying to get a rather sketchy run approved for it.
I've had past runs of this game before on my channel and any time a new and better run is acheived I delete the old one to prevent a clutter of alot of obsolete runs 2 weeks later. It's part of my way keeping the channel clean. Guess I've learned my lesson on that.
If the bitrate is the issue, then THANK YOU, that's a second opinion that I want to hear. I'm all for constructive criticism here. The accusations of this run have been all deleted so I've been left completely in the dark over this and it has been knawing at me.
I used the elgato gaming HD to record this. The original video file is 22GB big. When I used movie maker to edit out all the resetted attempts it wound up 2.5 GB so that more or less explains the quality issues.
However, I will not upload the original video of this run. Instead I'm going to go the extra mile here and do a new run and get within a comparable time to the one in question. Hell I'll do 5 different runs with the same result if that is what it'll take. I make no promises that I won't beat the time in question though considering the disasterous Ice Palace and the new Tori route I discovered as recently as a day ago.
I'm not asking for lagmastr's removal though, I'm not even asking for modship here :/. Due to the situation I felt asking for that was not right but as far as I knew it was only one accuser being a troll and took Tron_Javolta's advice to heart. Now that we have established there is more than one here clearly suspecting the run I can go ahead and do what must be done and call the run illegitimate myself and take back the advice to request modship out of respect for the other runners.
All I wanted was for someone to look at the run and give it an official decision that isn't my own, nothing more. It was at least in my mind the most fair way of handling this situation. I don't even care if it's rejected. I can start over and replicate a new run with different results here and still get a comparable time. I'm not a fraud. I've even done routing videos of this game for other people's benefits.
That was my bad I took the evidence that was given at hand at the time and didn't look any deeper, I didn't get to see the run and actually gonna watch it once I get home, although I'm very curious which parts exactly like time stamp-wise were suspicious, @Brapchu anyone can come out of anywhere and do well with a game, just because someone uploads a video at a certain time doesn't mean they literally just started then, I have a "new" person that's been running deadcore who just recently started posting and shreds the game, but he's been playing for a while and only just started posting runs, I'm not defending anyone, but stating it's not always that simple
On top of everything else, I will also make a detailed guide of many of my strats and go as in depth as I can to explain how I can do many of these jumps and tricks seemlessly. It's something I've been considering ever since the drama that unfolded surrounding Mrhyrulegamer and Apollo Legend. I feel there is no better time than now to do this.
This will take alot time though so all I will ask is some patience. I'm still very new to recording runs as newer speedrunner in the scene and feel I've made a terrible error in choosing my first capture card for this but it's something I will have to work around
Alright 28:12 in your run did look suspicious and I looked at other runs at that point and none of them had something like that happen, not sure if that's some new strat or what
At 28:12 when Glendaal's head hits the ceiling it actually clips him through it and puts him back on the floor or at least that's how I understand it. It's a strange glitch but PJ uses this as well. There is another point where this happens in Ghost Ship. I'll look for the time stamp.
As for why other runs don't do it here is probably because the time save over doing it as opposed to not doing it is minimal at best and that's if the runner knows how to move along the invisible conveyor belt surrounding the lone spike in that room.
Time stamp of the same glitch in Ghost Ship: 1:08:38
You can also execute this glitch by item jumping off the keys in the room time stamped at 23:02. This saves no time though so I don't do it there. It is also possible to do it in Ice Palace by item jumping off the token in the time stamp 1:23:54 but this potentially can get you stuck in the pillars. In other words, it's a potential softlock.
Do you have the time stamps (as I'm sure you've looked over your video) of what the questionable parts even are? like with "bitrate" and such because so far half an hour in I haven't seen anything wrong with the run aside from that glitch which is supposedly a glitch anyways
"Alright 28:12 in your run did look suspicious and I looked at other runs at that point and none of them had something like that happen, not sure if that's some new strat or what"
as soon as that happens you can see him jump around and fidget in place, as if he was momentarily disoriented by the sudden vertical movement like you would be if something like that happened
Literally just after that happens, the dude walks forward and basically walks straight into a spike and dies. I don't know why anyone trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes and cheat a time would then include a really silly mistake. And then quite a few more deaths as the run goes on. It looks like a fairly ordinary ass speedrun to me.
this all strikes me as a pretty weak accusation levelled at a totally random dude who's been nothing but polite about it because he beat a popular streamer's (PJ) time. Fuck that. While IMO this is kinda bullshit, you're responding correctly d4gron, keep posting route videos, keep improving your time, it'll come around in time if you just consistently output runs and strats. Keep on keeping on.
Honestly I agree, I didn't mean what I said to sound like I'm accusing as well considering I am only half an hour into the run with no idea what glitches and other things are accompanied with it, I'm just wondering what even are the points at which brapchu thought hey this is definitely spliced. So far he hasn't delivered (thought maybe d4gron would know at what points he was being accused), and ahdok's account was legit made to comment on this thread. It's a five hour old account with a twitch account linked to it that doesn't exist, which is a pretty shitty thing to do.
The most notable time-stamp I can think of involving a serious bitrate/quality drop problems is everything beginning from 57:12 to 1:00:30 which is the last part of Afralona.
There might be issues in Atlena (the underwater dungeon) too but that dungeon is dark in general and makes it hard for me to notice the issues there.
Otherwise I've been unable to notice anything else beyond that when I looked it over.
But again maybe my computer is shit...or my smartphone makes it harder to see these bitrate problems at the highest possible quality choice the video has (480p). It's been tough for me to actually take the time to look at this run as I had to look after my nephew all day yesterday.
Don't delete your run because of Brapchu man, I still think you should obtain mod status for that game and everything regardless of someone and their alt account accusing you, there was nothing wrong with the video, trust me I know a thing about awful video/bit rate, my call of duty MWR runs are littered with that
"Literally just after that happens, the dude walks forward and basically walks straight into a spike and dies. I don't know why anyone trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes and cheat a time would then include a really silly mistake. And then quite a few more deaths as the run goes on. It looks like a fairly ordinary ass speedrun to me."
That spike death happened because jumping over it is arguably frame perfect. Atlena is the only dungeon where such a feat is possible otherwise you need to item jump on a still airborne item (see 1:28:20). I simply jumped too late there resulting in death. A truly dumb mistake would be the one at around 1:28:45. But yeah, I feel the best course of action is to just keep doing runs. No more deleting any of my past runs.
@Tron_Javolta I won't be deleting the run if solely because deleting it would be running away from the problem. I'll take it as a badge of shame if that's what it comes down to and prove the doubters wrong down the road.
@Tron_Javolta "Don't delete your run because of Brapchu man, I still think you should obtain mod status for that game and everything regardless of someone and their alt account accusing you,"
Yeah..Ahdok and I are clearly the same..thats why he is a british guy and I'm from germany.. and thats why he is a mod on PJ's Twitch channel and I am not...thats why we have two seperate accounts talking to each other sometimes on PJ's discord.
@d4gr0n please explain this ghosting in your videos: http://imgur.com/a/WTzuW . This happens when you overlap two different recordings with two different framerates and "splice" them together.
This should not happen with an untouched or just plain edited file at all.
"That spike death happened because jumping over it is arguably frame perfect."
Oh. Sorry. I'm only passingly familiar with the game, not sure how hard these things are.
"@d4gr0n please explain this ghosting in your videos: http://imgur.com/a/WTzuW . This happens when you overlap two different recordings with two different framerates and "splice" them together.
This should not happen with an untouched or just plain edited file at all."
To this I will answer. When the run finished uploading, youtube asked if that they could "improve the quality". I didn't actually think this would cause a problem, clearly I was wrong. Now I must in return ask if the same problem persists in my 1:41:23 run from a couple months ago because I'm 99% sure youtube did nothing to that video.
If it is NOT that however it is because of my capture card of which the only solution is to play around with the settings and find out how to stop that effect from happening. It might be that it is trying to capture at 60 frames a second and my capture card just can't do it properly leading to the effect you are seeing. I'm going to play around with it for a bit